Tokyo Underworld

by Robert Whiting

  His defense in court was to claim that Wong had switched the gold – that the gold had originally been authentic, then sold by Crazy Wong and replaced with counterfeit gold. It made sense whether it was true or not, and it was certainly plausible given the ease with which a man could buy fake gold in Okachimachi. The judge was bound to ask why anyone would pay $160,000 and not immediately get a receipt for it – which was a good question, because it is essentially what had happened.

  But Nick was getting tired of going to court. He was running out of attorneys willing to defend him. In fact, one of his own ex-lawyers was even being quoted around town as saying that Mr Nicola was the most unreasonable gaijin he had ever met and that he had never hated anyone more. At the same time, Nick also guessed that in the end he would probably lose – again – no matter who defended him or what the argument was. A Chinese versus an American before a Japanese judge? He had no doubt who was worse off, especially considering the insults that Japanese and Americans had been slinging at each other across the Pacific. For example, when Shintaro Ishihara offered the view that Japanese could always make a better product than the Americans, US Senator Ernest Hollings retorted that they were forgetting who made the atomic bomb. They ought to be sent a reminder, he suggested, a mushroom cloud image with the legend affixed, ‘A quality product made in the USA and tested in Japan.’ (Hollings later apologized.)

  The Crazy Wong proceedings had just gotten started when Nick received a bill for 6 million yen (almost $60,000) for having the first batch of court-related documents translated. By the time the case was over, given such prices, he might very well be bankrupt. With the recession looking as though it was never going to end, he was in a hopeless sinkhole.

  Enough was enough, he decided. It was time to pack up and move out of Tokyo.

  He would sell his restaurant, leave his wife to manage her domain, and move to New Zealand, where his daughter and her three children were living. There, maybe he would buy some land, open a golf course and make new millions. The King of Auckland – that had a nice ring to it.

  Nick made one last trip to Hokkaido. On the lone night he spent in Sapporo, he had a car take him for a final nostalgic spin around the city, despite a cold, driving autumn rain. At one point, he passed the wood frame house where Miyoko and her mother had resided and saw a light on inside. On impulse, he had the driver stop and back up. He got out, limped hatless through the downpour, and rang the doorbell. To his surprise, Miyoko answered. She was carrying a small child in her arms.

  He flashed her his old devil-may-care grin and explained that he’d just been passing by and wanted to say good-bye. He was getting out of the restaurant business, he said, moving on to New Zealand to become a golf magnate. But he couldn’t leave without seeing her once more – to say thanks for all the good times they had had together and to tell her he had forgotten about the bad ones.

  He thought that, after her initial surprise had worn off, she actually looked happy to see him. She told him she had gotten married to a man who worked at the local cemetery, that she had joined a religious order, and that life was good, if not as exciting as it used to be. Then she flashed him a big, warm smile. He peered through the rain at her, leaning on his cane. She had put on considerable weight, and he thought she looked a bit like a middle-linebacker. But with her huge breasts, she was still a knockout. He leered at her. He had the feeling that Miyoko wanted to ask him in.

  ‘I’d fuck her,’ he thought to himself, ‘even though she’s the woman that cost me a billion dollars. Hell, I’d fuck all my ex-wives. One big farewell salute. If only I could get it up.’

  But getting it up was no longer an option. Neither was walking normally or reading or driving, for that matter. So after chatting for a while, he said his good-byes and left.

  The next day, he had his barn and silo torn down.

  In January 1992, he sold Nicola’s Roppongi to the Moti chain of Indian restaurants for a million dollars. He paid off his staff, gave some money to his children, and kept the rest. Then he sat down to plot his first post-retirement move.

  He had promised himself that he would settle the various accounts that had built up over the years.

  All of them.

  Just as Michael Corleone had done in the last scene of The Godfather. He would hire some men and have all the people who had screwed him wiped out in a day: the Nihon Kotsu people, the lawyers, Crazy Wong. Then, that very same evening, they would all get on a plane and disappear. Nick’s enemies would never know what hit them.

  The assassins would not be anyone in the Tosei-kai, although that idea had a certain poetic appeal to it. The criminal division of the TSK was not very active locally, as far as Nick could see. According to Nick’s sources, Machii was in such poor health that he was unable to even receive visitors anymore, let alone physically run such an enterprise. A mutual acquaintance had espied him some years earlier at Tokyo Station on his way to Kobe to attend an important mob funeral. ‘He could barely make it up the stairs,’ said the man. ‘His kobun had to help him. He had a bad liver from drinking too much, as well as a bad heart.’ Most all the other gang members Nick had known had retired, or moved their base of operations to California, Hawaii, or some location in Asia – some of them just disappeared. Only occasionally did he run into somebody from the old days, like the afternoon in 1991 when he had played a rare game of pachinko and went to exchange his winnings for cash. He had been directed by a parlor employee to an alleyway near his restaurant; there, waiting at a window by a row of blue plastic garbage cans was an elderly man whom Nick recognized as a one-time TSK soldier under Matsubara.

  ‘Hey, Neeku-san,’ the man had said, waving a gnarled hand, bereft of the tip of one little finger. ‘Genki desu ka?’

  They stood and exchanged pleasantries and reminiscences. TSK yakuza had a small operation in Shinjuku, the man told Nick, something in Ginza, and that was about it. There were only 500 gang members in the entire city, and in Roppongi some other group was collecting the protection money.

  The man said that Matsubara was in the Tokyo Red Cross Hospital, seriously ill, and he wanted to know if it was true that Matsubara’s one-time nemesis, Mike Sullivan, was now a TV personality living in the United States. Nick said yes. The TSK man shook his head in wonder and said that this was news they would have to keep from the boss. It would upset him too much.

  There was a growing selection of foreign thugs in the area – young men from Southeast Asia, Iran, India and so on, who formed a pool of foreign migrant labor. They had let it be known that they were available to perform certain tasks. In fact, he had gotten an estimate of $17,500 for his Godfather scenario from Filipino contact. It was a group rate, the man had said, although he wasn’t sure what the $500 was for. But in the end, Nick ruled that option out. He was swimming in uncharted waters, and besides, it seemed more fitting somehow to have the New York Mafia handle this particular chore.

  He swore that’s just what he would do.

  Then he had his third heart attack.

  He clung to life in a bed at Dr Aksenoff’s clinic for several days, his fingernails turning black from poor circulation, his wife Yae constantly at his side.

  And, on June 10, 1992, at the age of seventy-one, he died.

  Among his last words to Yae were, ‘I never thought you’d be such a good wife.’

  The funeral was held at the austere Franciscan chapel in Roppongi, 200 yards east of the former site of Tom’s, where Killer Ikeda had once held a gun to Nick’s head. Several hundred people attended, a cross-section of Tokyo society that included businessmen, diplomats, entertainers, expatriates, ex-black marketeers. A delegation from the Tosei-kai also put in an appearance.

  As Nicola Koizumi was laid to rest in a cemetery in Fujisawa, letters and cards poured in from the States to his widow. Many people wrote to express memories of the old days and their longing for an era that did not exist anymore. Some of Nick’s friends were of the opinion that he had simply died of a broken
heart. He had no more restaurants to run. He wasn’t Nicola anymore, and that was too much for him to bear. Others believed that it was his rage at Japan that killed him. Retirement had just given him that much more free time to dwell on all the perceived injustices his adopted home had visited upon him. His heart was too weak to stand up to the strain of it all.

  The suit by Crazy Wong remained unsettled, as did other outstanding claims against him. Nick’s criminal file was transferred to the inactive section of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. It was, said a police representative, the thickest file ever assembled in the history of the department for an American.

  He left behind a number of other records as well. He had made and lost more money than any other American in Japan. He had been married to and divorced from more Japanese women than any other American. He had been involved in more civil suits than any other American and had spent more years in court.

  And, of course, he had been the only gaijin King of Roppongi.

  Epilogue

  Japan, for all its strides as a constitutional democracy, was still a country of secret meetings and back room deals made by faceless, colorless fixers, a society where one never knew what was going on until after the fact – if then. Any hopes that this modus operandi would soon disappear were certainly dampened by the events of the 1990s, which culminated in the 1998 election of a prime minister, the LDP’s Keizo Obuchi, who took office with the lowest public support rating in the postwar history of the country, one that was barely in double digits. (Obuchi’s election was masterminded by the aforementioned Noboru Takeshita, a former PM who went on to become the leading backstage wirepuller in the LDP.) LDP power broker Kanemaru was forced to resign his Diet seat in 1992 when it became known he had a ‘relationship’ with the gang boss Susumu Ishii and that one of Ishii’s corporate arms, Tokyo Sagawa Kyubin, had inundated him with cash and gifts. In 1993, Kanemaru was indicted for tax evasion and a search of his home by prosecutors uncovered enough cash, bearer bonds, gold ingots and other booty to ransom the island of Honshu. Prosecutors also discovered evidence that Kanemaru owned $440 million worth of Hawaiian real estate. However, Kanemaru died during his trial and, aside from the Tokyo Sagawa Kyubin president, nobody involved in that scandal went to jail – an outcome not surprising to those familiar with trying political bribery cases in Japan.

  The financial scandals involving the compensation of big investors and the granting of interest-free loans to mobster clients were also resolved in what might be described as a less than satisfactory manner. Nomura and the other brokerages received only light punishments – a suspension of trading for three months on the average – and after serving their sentences took up where they left off. Senior executives who had submitted ritual resignations to take ‘responsibility’ for the problem then returned through the back door as ‘advisers’. The first Tokyu stockholders meeting held since the scandal broke was an indication of how unlikely a change in the status quo really was. Held in a Shibuya movie theater in June 1992, it took all of twenty-six minutes. There was an apology for all the ‘confusion’ that had been caused. A sokaiya rose to shout, ‘No questions.’ And then the gathering was treated to a free showing of the film Basic Instinct. Such breathtaking brevity was typical of most other shareholders’ meetings which took place at the time. A Securities and Exchange Law, revised in 1991 in response to public anger, was largely ignored, as the under-the-table payments to preferred customers continued, a state of affairs explained perhaps by the discovery some years later that several senior bureaucrats in the Ministry of Finance and Bank of Japan had accepted bribes and hospitality from the executives they were supposed to be policing.

  The adverse publicity that surrounded these scandals did cause the 1992 ouster of the LDP from power in a no-confidence vote for the first time in nearly forty years, after a group of rebellious Young Turks deserted the party. A new reform-minded government was installed behind a youthful, fashion-conscious prime minister, Morihiro Hosokawa, descendant of a feudal prince and a provincial governor thought to be outside the maelstrom of brokered politics. Some optimists in the media and on the political scene hailed this as a sign that a new corruption-free Japan was finally emerging, US ambassador to Japan Walter Mondale even compared this new administration to ‘Camelot’. Yet, in 1994, in a turn of events reeking with irony, it was revealed that Hosokawa had had his own illicit financial dealings with the infamous Sagawa trucking firm and he was forced to resign. Mondale, along with so many others, was compelled to reexamine his grasp of politics in Japan. Within three short years, the LDP would be back in power.

  Predictably, attempts were made to blame the United States for Japan’s economic woes. During the spectacular plunge of the Nikkei Dow, for example, it was the foreign brokerages that came in for much of the blame for selling borrowed stock, thereby inducing it to fall further. When Japanese regulators cited firms like Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley for their use of arbitrage and futures markets in the spring of 1992, hate mail aimed at the gaijin investment houses, (sometimes accompanied by bomb threats) began to appear (e.g., ‘Foreigners Beware. You have plotted to send stock prices lower and have thus profited greatly. This has already caused hundreds of people to commit suicide … the pained souls of those who have committed suicide are wandering around your offices. The country is now caught up in a vicious circle, where companies go into the red and bankruptcies greatly increase, unemployment rises, robbers cheat and murders multiply, suicides rise and numerous other incidents occur. All of this because of foreigners … Foreigners, employees of foreign firms, get the hell out of Japan.’). Conveniently ignored in the correspondence was the fact that everyone from Japanese insurance and trust companies to the big brokerages were themselves talking down the market as well, essentially doing the same thing.

  Some Japanese economists were tracing the roots of the recession to Japan’s acceptance of a series of US demands, starting with the 1985 Plaza Accord. It was US policy, they said, which led to the waves of speculation in Japan and the ensuing bad loan problem. This was an argument that had more merit than the one expressed in the above circular. Indeed, if US policy helped to create the Japanese juggernaut (or ‘Frankenstein monster’ as one author preferred to put it) through a preferential trade and security policy, then it might also be said that the United States helped create the conditions for cheap borrowing in Japan by engineering the rise in the yen. (However, the US government did not advise the Japanese banks to engage in irresponsible lending practices.) Both of these courses of action, ironically, wound up adversely affecting the US economy.

  Eventually, however, the economic malaise that gripped Japan for the rest of the century, one in which the yen would lose over half its value, came to be known in many circles as the ‘Yakuza recession’. It was gradually discovered that the major banks held billions of yen in bad debts, a significant portion of which were housing loans channeled through middleman financing companies (jusen) that were involved with organized crime. The money had been used to buy overpriced real estate, condominiums and golf courses, investments that soured in the recession of the 1990s. Prompting a reverse of the sell-off of US real estate purchases (including the Tiffany Building in New York) and other corporate acquisitions began in earnest, and the specter of a Godzilla-like Japan gobbling up America faded almost overnight.

  Efforts by bankers to collect this sour debt showed just how overmatched their institutions were in dealing with their recalcitrant clients. In 1994, the manager of Sumitomo’s branch in the city of Nagoya, who had sought to retrieve billions in overdue jusen loans, was shot in the head outside his tenth-floor apartment as he responded to an early morning knock at his door. The year before, the vice president in charge of loans at Hanwa Bank near Osaka had been murdered. Government money subsequently had to be used to rescue the leading failed housing loan corporations, making the bailout, as one magazine put it, ‘The first ever taxpayer-financed debt forgiveness of a nation’s crimin
al underworld.’

  The highly touted enactment of antigang laws and outlawing organizations with over a certain percentage of members having arrest records and electoral laws that increased somewhat the power of the urban voter, modifying somewhat the old multimember district during the nineties, did little to dislodge the black streak of corruption and influence peddling embedded within the system. Although a wave of FTC investigations into construction bid-rigging, for example, actually led to the indictment and conviction of an ex-construction minister in 1994 for taking a bribe – an eyewitness insider in another more important case was ‘persuaded’ to recant his accusations against thirty-one other dango participants. Thus were collusive arrangements among industry construction heavyweights able to continue.

  With only 2,000 prosecutors in the entire country, the approximate number that serves an average big city in the United States, there was simply not nearly enough honest manpower to investigate all the corruption that continued to go on, so relentless was the circulation of back-door gelt.

  In 1997, the big story was that the chief brokerage houses were paying record amounts of cash, secretly, to corporate extortionists, to keep them from revealing facts about hidden debt, illegal loans, and secret accounts the houses held for VIPs in the Japanese government. One of the VIPs, according to the Shukan Gendai, was the then prime minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, while another was a cabinet minister who had once solicited gangsters to suppress a book exposing corruption in his district. In the ensuing turmoil, the nation’s oldest securities house, Yamaichi Securities, was discovered to have billions of dollars in hidden debt and forced to declare bankruptcy, leaving 6,000 workers jobless and helping to send the Nikkei Stock Index, which had been showing signs of recovery, into another tailspin. This was not beneficial to the financial currency crisis that struck Asia in the fall of that same year, the repercussions of which were felt all the way back to Wall Street.